About

Düdle - the game of illustrating ridiculous randomly generated phrases - is the brainchild of Oz and Benn of Hat and Key Studio.

As creative people we are always making things. Visit our website and personal blogs at www.HatAndKeyStudio.com to see some of our other projects. Düdle is our biggest idea yet! We love playing all kinds of tabletop, card, and video games with our friends and decided that we wanted to come up with our own.

Since Oz is an intermediate school art teacher, she wanted a creative drawing game that she could also use in her classroom. Several brainstorming and play-testing sessions later, Düdle was born.

It’s simple. Each player draws 5 cards: 1 adjective, 2 nouns, 1 verb, and 1 adverb. These 5 words make the phrase the player will illustrate. All the players keep their words secret while they draw their phrases. When everyone finishes the group takes turns trying to guess the words that each artist had based on their drawings. Each correct word guessed earns the artist two points, while each close, but not exact word earns them 1 point. The player with the most points wins!

What does a Gigantic Gazebo-Bucket Running Evilly look like?

Every group that has play-tested Düdle has loved it! Even the self-proclaimed “bad artists.” It’s been the hit of parties, the saving grace of power outages, and a great cross-curricular classroom activity.

Since it’s a game about creativity, we also encourage you to adapt and make up your own house rules. For instance, Oz only has her students draw 4 cards (skipping the adverb) to adjust the game to fit their level. Sometimes we play without scoring or decide the winner by the drawing that gets the hardest laugh when revealed. Whatever way you decide to play, Düdle is sure to be a game that you will love.

So it turns out that it costs a lot of money to get a game printed! We would love to share Düdle with as many people as possible and that's where you come in! If we are able to meet our funding goal we will have enough to do an initial first edition print run of Düdle! By backing Düdle you will be among the first to get a copy of the first edition of Düdle. We have some great ideas for expansion packs and other editions of the game, but we need to get the first edition made before we can think about expanding.

So if Düdle sounds like a game you think you would enjoy, please back us! Share Düdle with all of your creative, artist, and teacher friends!

Want to learn even more about what has gone into making Düdle? We've been blogging about the whole process on our website: www.DudleGame.com.

Risks and challenges

Düdle's biggest challenge has been finding vendors for manufacturing the game and rewards. But after lots of research we think we’ve found some great companies. All are US based companies and most of them are local New Jersey companies. We can’t be sure how manufacturing on a larger scale will go. We’re sure there will be some unforeseen bumps in the road, but we know that they won’t be able to stop Düdle. A major factor in our choice of vendor has been customer service. All the companies that we intend to use have been awesome to work with. We're confident that our vendors will be there to help us if we end up in a pickle.